APC Universal Notebook Battery

APC's Universal Notebook Battery is an external Lithium Polymer battery pack that greatly extends your operating time away from AC outlets. Advertised to supply "up to" eight hours of juice, the endurance it provides varies depending on your notebook's appetite and workload.

 

To get a general idea of how far into that transcontinental flight you'll be able to work (or watch movies) with the APC battery, compare its capacity to your laptop's internal battery. For a notebook with a typical 42-watt-hour battery, the 80-watt-hour APC unit will roughly triple your unplugged operating time. The cost of this freedom is $249 and an additional two pounds of travel weight.

 

The Universal Notebook Battery works with a wide range of units right out of the box, thanks to a voltage selector dial and a generous array of included connectors to fit various power jacks (some competing products require you to buy tips separately, which can cost $10 apiece). A Y-cable eliminates the need for an extra AC adapter by linking the battery to the notebook with one plug and the notebook's AC adapter with another.

 

Our test notebook (a Dell Inspiron 8600) locked the CPU speed to the lowest SpeedStep setting when using the battery because it didn't recognize the APC device as a supported AC adapter; since we would normally run in power-optimized mode while on batteries, this wasn't much of a problem, and APC plans to offer a tip to support all newer Dell models soon.

 

Using just the APC battery, we got through the entire movie Hero (1 hour and 36 minutes) and most of Napoleon Dynamite (1 hour and 15 minutes) before the last of the battery's five power indicator lights stopped flashing orange and the internal battery took over. That works out to an impressive total of 2 hours and 51 minutes, and you can expect an even longer runtime when using less intensive applications like e-mail or word processing.

 

The APC runs cool enough that we could barely feel it on our legs while working; in fact, it can be used inside a notebook case, a convenience for those with "workstation" style cases that open to allow access to the system without removing it. The only drawback is that, as with any cable-attached external battery, it's inconvenient to move the laptop when the battery is connected.

 

Overall, the APC Universal Notebook Battery does what it's supposed to do and comes with everything you need to boost your laptop's longevity without forcing you to buy extra accessories to make it compatible.